Chapter 3 Theo
THEO
Idon’t see the woman again, not as night falls, and not the next morning, either.
I don’t have to sleep much—none of my kind do—and I don’t bother going back to my cabin.
The night is warm enough and the moon is small enough, just a sliver of a fingernail against the sky, that I’m able to take advantage of the cloak of darkness and risk being out on the open beach.
The pier that I used when I was a boy has long since rotted into the lake, and the boat I keep in the basement of the cabin, along with a pair of polished oars, to use when the killing moon calls my name.
Since I rarely have need to cross the water, I rarely go down to the beach.
Beach was always my mother’s word for it—really, it’s just a narrow strip of dirt where the lake laps against the shore, barely a foot wide.
But the trees don’t grow there, and it puts me out in the open. It’s important that I stay invisible.
But I want to watch the woman’s house. Those big picture windows the houses all have show everything when people turn their lights on after dark—and they do, constantly, night after night. They think they’re alone out here, save for each other.
The new woman is no exception. Her house is lit up like a campfire, and it seems to me that it glows brighter than the other houses along the shore.
It has a particularly large window on the first floor, one that’s practically the entire width of the house, and I can see the silhouettes of furniture against the backdrop of light.
Occasionally, I see movement, too. Her? That, I can’t tell.
I also can’t tell if she’s alone or not, although I don’t catch any other new scents on the wind.
I watch her by watching the light. First, all of downstairs is illuminated.
Then it dims into a soft, neon glow. She must be watching TV.
Then it flicks off entirely, and the light goes on upstairs, and my breath quickens, because there’s a big window up there, too, with a balcony that I can only assume leads into her bedroom.
She passes in front of it four times—I count each one, certain it’s her—but I don’t see much more than that.
She has the curtains drawn. Her silhouette is clear. Nothing else is.
Then that light goes off, and the house fades into the night.
I keep vigil, though. That’s most of what I do these days, anyway.
Keep vigil in the forbidden woods across the lake.
Make sure to keep the stories up. The ghost of Theo Shorn haunts these woods, after all, seeking vengeance for his murder.
If you want to go hiking, stay on the eastern side of the lake, and definitely don’t cross onto the narrow peninsula that cuts into the water like a knife.
Those Keep Out signs are nailed to the trees for a reason.
It’s rare for me to keep vigil like this, though. To watch someone specific. At least, someone I don’t intend to kill.
What if she crosses the lake? whispers a dark, raspy voice in the back of my head. Would you kill her then?
I mutter wordlessly in the back of my throat, the closest I get to vocal speech, and the sound of my frustration is swallowed up by the waves washing against the dirt my mother called a beach. I kill all trespassers.
Well, except for Oliver, when he showed up a few months ago, crashing through the underbrush. But in the sixty years since my first revival, he’s been the only exception.
I stay out on the shore until the light shifts into the cobwebby grey of dawn, and then I slip back into the safety of the woods.
My stomach growls, reminding me I need to eat.
I was so caught up in my vigil that I hadn’t noticed my hunger.
It’s not the first time it’s happened, and I know it won’t be the last.
So I go home. Breakfast is a venison steak fried up with garlic from the far western side of my territory and a cup of coffee.
The coffee is from the last camper I killed, about a month ago, and I’m almost out.
I’ve been rationing it, saving it for special occasions.
And glimpsing that woman, catching her scent, felt special enough.
After I eat, I go out on the porch to finish my coffee.
I’m hoping I might catch the trail of her scent again, even though my cabin is set far enough back from the lake that I often don’t sense the humans out here.
Still, I like being outside more than I like being inside.
It’s been long enough that the cabin doesn’t remind me of my mother, of what my life was like before I died for the first time.
But I still feel constrained by it. Enclosed.
The wind stirs the leaves around; I catch whiffs of the animals out in the woods. A raccoon burying into the underbrush. A pair of deer grazing off to the north. The opossums that live in the crawl space under my house, no doubt sleeping now that the sun has come up.
And then a human scent twines through. Not hers, not the woman’s. And not a hiker’s, either.
Oliver’s back.
I settle down on the old porch swing to wait for him; he knows his way through my territory well enough to make it from the beach to the cabin.
Maybe it’s hypocritical of me, letting a little human boy wander around my territory when I have a reputation to maintain.
But for all my bloodlust, I’m not predisposed to killing children—they don’t provide enough of a challenge, for one.
For another, they haven’t had the years necessary to accumulate any real sins.
I assume anyone old enough has done something worthy of death, and I figure children ought to have the opportunity to transgress before I snuff their life out.
Oliver was the first child to ever step foot on my territory, though.
It’s rough terrain, so the hikers and campers leave the kiddies at home.
When Veritas was still around, gasping for breath, the few kids in town knew not to cross the lake.
But no one ever told Oliver, and a little over six months ago, I intercepted him near the graveyard after tracking him for about half an hour, nervous about what a small boy was doing out here by himself.
When he saw me, he didn’t react with fear, only curiosity.
Then he made words with his hands. Words I recognized, because my mother had taught me that same way of speaking when I was a child, and it became clear I needed an alternative to my voice.
The second I saw him say, My name is Oliver! What’s yours? I knew I couldn’t kill him, and not just because he was a child. He reminded me too much of the first version of myself, the version that wasn’t a killer.
His small, pattering footsteps echo through the trees.
I lean forward, watching for him, and a few seconds later, he emerges, looking a great deal like he did that first day, with a brown leaf tangled in his hair and his little blue-and-green dinosaur backpack.
He blinks up at the porch, then waves excitedly at me. I gesture for him to come on up.
“You’re here early,” I say, setting my mostly-empty coffee cup aside to talk.
He shrugs. “Mom was yelling again.” Then he sits down on the swing beside me. Even after six months, I’m not totally used to how fearless he is around me. It’s like he can’t sense that I’m a predator.
I don’t mind, though. As much as I shouldn’t admit it, it is nice to have the company.
Oliver sets his backpack on his lap, unzips it, and hands me a stack of paper. I know what they are. More of his drawings.
At our second or third meeting, I made the mistake of telling Oliver that I did not cross the lake.
I told him this because he wanted me to come over to his house and see his collection of rocks, which I gather is very impressive, and I, of course, don’t cross the lake unless it’s to kill.
I didn’t tell him that last part. When he asked, I said I wasn’t allowed to leave and then, because I didn’t know what else to do, strongly implied that I’m a ghost.
Ever since then, Oliver has been bringing me drawings of what he calls the outside world.
At first, they were things around his house: his rock collection, an expensive-looking television set, an odd boxy thing he explained was something called a video game console that belonged to his brother.
Eventually, he expanded his subjects to include items from the woods across the lake, and then from Pinella, which had been little more than a post office when I was a boy but has apparently grown to replace Veritas.
The top drawing today shows a row of kids in what look like pajamas, their hands in fists near their faces. Oliver taps my shoulders so I look up at him. “My BJJ classes,” he says, and then rolls his eyes.
“You should take these seriously,” I tell him. “It’s good to be able to defend yourself.” As I can personally attest. I know what it is to be the strange boy who doesn’t speak with his voice.
“You sound like Dad. He says I need to stop whining and toughen up.”
“You don’t need to be tougher,” I tell him, which is also true. Toughness is wasted on humans. It gets them killed by people like me. “You just need to know what to do if someone tries to hurt you.” Another human, I mean, although I don’t say that.
Oliver rolls his eyes again, then pushes the page aside.
This one shows a table with an ice cream sundae, the ice cream colored in rainbow markers and topped with a dollop of whipped cream and, of course, a fire-engine red cherry.
“The ice cream shop in Pinella,” Oliver says excitedly.
“My mom dropped me off there while she was messing around with something for Owen.”
I smile at that. Oliver first started mentioning the ice cream shop a month ago, along with the fact that his mother had forbidden him from trying it. Apparently, he managed to find a way around the ban. “Was it good?”
“The best!” He gives me a huge grin. I flip to the next page.
It’s a woman. Just her face, with a dark fall of hair, although there’s something sweet in her expression. Oliver is good with portraits. Better than a ten-year-old has any right to be.
“Who’s this?” I ask him, studying his face as I sign. I think I already know, even though I couldn’t get a good look at her face, not from this distance.
“My new neighbor,” he signs back.
My heart pounds in my chest, and I look back down at the portrait. She’s lovely. Oliver didn’t add much color to this one; just the dark brown of her hair and the lighter brown of her eyes. It’s sketchy, perhaps a bit rushed, but I can clearly see the woman in the messy lines on the paper.
Oliver taps on my hand, getting me to look at him again. “She moved in yesterday,” he signs, brimming with excitement. “Her name is Chloe!” He signs the name out, letter by letter, and I suck in a sharp breath. Her name. I wanted her name, and now I have it.
“And she knows ASL!” he continues. “Maybe we can all be friends?”
My pulse thunders. Is that why I was so drawn to her, this Chloe, sitting with her legs dangling into the water? Did I sense it, somehow? That she wouldn’t laugh at me, like the girls in Veritas did? That she would speak to me, and be able to see me speak, too?
Oliver’s staring up at me expectantly, waiting for my response.
I swallow. It doesn’t matter if she knows ASL; I can’t bring a grown woman across the lake.
She’ll know what I am the second she sees me.
A predator, a monster. Women see it much more easily than men, and certainly more easily than children.
“Maybe,” I sign. Oliver frowns, and I add, “I’m not sure she’ll understand.”
“Understand what?”
I grit my jaw. “That I’m a ghost,” I finally say, even though I don’t like lying to him. Then, on a whim, I add. “Like your mother wouldn’t understand.”
That was the wrong thing to say, of course. Oliver shakes his head furiously, and his hands and arms fly out. “No, she’s not like her at all! She’s nice!”
Something pangs in my chest. Sympathy, I suppose.
I don’t feel it often—certainly not for humans—but it’s easy to feel it for Oliver.
Oliver’s mother is not like my mother, from what he’s told me.
She’s not kind. She’s the sort of mother who, in my day, would have shipped a boy like us off to a boarding school so she wouldn’t have to deal with him.
That sort of thing was more common in the fifties.
Not so much now. Now, women like her are expected to raise the children they think are broken.
Still, I can’t have this Chloe meet me. I don’t want to break Oliver’s heart like that, to have him learn that his only friend out here is, in fact, not a ghost but a living murderer.
“Why don’t we wait?” I say, forming the words slowly. “Like I told you, I have to be careful who I let on my property. People don’t always understand.”
“She will,” Oliver insists.
He’s not usually this stubborn. I sigh. “At least wait a few weeks,” I finally say. “Give me a chance to clean up my house.”
That finally mollifies him. He sighs and rolls his eyes and huffs a little. “A haunted house doesn’t have to be clean!” he signs, stabbing decisively into the air with his small child’s fingers. I give him my best approximation of an indulgent smile.
Mostly, though, I hope in two weeks’ time, he’ll move on to something else.
At least our conversation moves on, this time to a movie Oliver watched a few days ago—he’s always telling me about the movies and TV shows he watches.
The video games he plays, when he’s able to play them.
Bringing the world to me. I pay attention, as I always do, but it’s harder than usual.
My thoughts keep wandering to Oliver’s new neighbor.
Chloe, with the long auburn hair and the long legs she splashes in the lake.
I know she won’t accept me. I’m nearly 80 years old at this point, even if I still look 30. I know what I am, and what humans are, and what our relationship is. Predator to prey. Killer to victim.
But I think of my father, and the tenderness he had for my mother—enough tenderness to let her live, to send her envelopes of cash every six months, to warn her what her son might turn out to be—and I wonder if maybe I could find that tenderness, too.